“Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist.”
“One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is tha tthose who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him.”
“The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute.”
“If those who had set themselves to explain the various theories of Christianity had set themselves instead to do the will of the Master, how different the world would be now!”
“Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“Every truth must be accompanied by some corresponding act.”
“I would not favour a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth... that saves the world.”
Source: George MacDonald: an anthology
“Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy.”
Source: Within and Without
“One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.”
Source: Annals Of A Quiet Neighbourhood
“It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. For the needs of today we have corresponding strength given. For the morrow we are told to trust. It is not ours yet. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.”
“God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth. How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven.”
“If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence.”
Source: THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE + PAUL FABER, SURGEON + THERE AND BACK - The Complete Series: The Curate's Awakening, The Lady's Confession & The Baron's Apprenticeship
“God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world, because it tells me his story; and what good men thought about him who knew him and accepted him.”
“Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help.”
“To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong in him. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature — the wrongness in him — the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.”
“To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth.”
Source: Creation in Christ: Unspoken Sermons
“If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure.”
“But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms.”
Source: THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE + PAUL FABER, SURGEON + THERE AND BACK - The Complete Series: The Curate's Awakening, The Lady's Confession & The Baron's Apprenticeship
“All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.”
“Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion.”
“Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace?”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire.”
“God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth.”
“But, for as cold and wretched as it looks, the sun has not forsaken it. He has only drawn away from it a little, for good reasons, one of which is that we may learn that we cannot do without him.”
“Each is but a means to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God — not in the laws themselves, except as his means of revealing himself. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God. For human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's science, it works with its back to him, and is always leaving him — his intent.”
“God is nearer to you than any thought or feeling of yours... Do not be afraid.”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.”
Source: The Miracles of Our Lord
“A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear”
Source: SIR GIBBIE & DONAL GRANT: The Baronet’s Song and The Shepherd’s Castle (Adventure Classic)
“If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“By all means rid yourself of an impoverished faith.”
“I learned that he that will be a hero will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work is sure of his manhood.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“Except the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I repeat is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us.”
Source: The World of George Macdonald: Selections from His Works of Fiction
“It is the heart that is not sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.”
Source: Donal Grant
“Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere and into here.”
“To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.”
Source: Unspoken Sermons, completed: MacDonald's Works
“Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace.”
“They will pressure you into doing things that may be unsafe, use your good judgment, and remember, 'I would rather be laughed at, than cried for.'”
“What does God want me to do?”, not “What will God do if I do so and so?”
Source: Unspoken Sermons, completed: MacDonald's Works
“As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?”
Source: Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III
